Issue 25: Nov 2002
Features
- | Foreword
- | Pocket an Atari!
- | Collecting Atari Games
- | Tip of the day
- | Unfinished Business
- | I had a dream: The Grid Sequencer!
- | Atari in the USA: Mr Atari's IDE
- | Atari 7800: The system that could (but didn't)
- | Tablet PCs in Today's World
- | Atari Goes Metal
Reviews
- | Unreal Tournament 2003
- | V-Rally 3
- | Do you have 19 inches of rack mounted Atari?
- | Multi Worms
- | Pixel Power
News
| Unreal Tournament 2003 Brian Nicholas kicks bot booty in Atari's wholesome new game 1999: Unreal Tournament, what a game! Fast and action-packed, a non-stop fun-filled ride for all the family, well OK not for the whole family but what a game. The game that gave you the true meaning to Deathmatch unlike Quake 2/3 that supposedly started it off. This led to the very big disappointment that was Quake 3 Arena which was just not very good, the game had no atmosphere and just no real enjoyment to the whole thing, the environments were boring and unimaginative, just a big let-down. So thank God Unreal Tourney came and saved the day, a true revolution in game design, a true classic in every way, the game had you hooked from the word go. The environments took you into the game, with their nice layouts which helped you flow through the game and with each map having a good uniqueness to each one and nice textures helped bring it all to life, most people's favourite was the Sky City map where you could leap from building to building, I must have played that map for hours. The characters in the game were OK, nothing we hadn't seen before but they were very good and went with the game nicely but the best touch was all the skins and mutators you could download and add in; along with a great all-round package these made this game just so good and highly addictive, winning game of the year in 1999 from most PC game review magazines. Now Unreal Tournament 2003 has come along hoping to get our blood to the boil once more and back hip thrusting like mad after a fabulous head shot. When I heard 4 - 5 months ago that UT2003 was coming out I was very eager to find out as much as I could, I downloaded video clips and I just could not believe how good the game looked and how much the graphics looked improved on the old UT, but they had managed to keep that nice unique feeling that UT gave. Then came the demo and after playing that for a bit I knew that we would be in for something special. The game I got the game home and could not believe it is three discs, and then I looked on the back of the case and saw that it takes up 3 GB of hard drive space, so if you have a small hard drive I would start to make some space right now! After the hour it takes to install (well that's what it feels like) and you start it up for the first time you are greeted by the main menu which is nice and very simple compared to its predecessor, as the old one was window-based, this menu just has five options which are shown below. Single player is the game itself, where you set yourself up for life in the arena. Here you select your character and team you wish to belong to, you can add what name you want to call yourself and also that for your team, it will also show you tutorials on each kind of game type - Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Double Domination and Bombing Run. Deathmatch Match Always an instant piece of fun, the AI of the bots in the game is quite challenging when you get to the mid-level of the bot skill levels you can choose from, that means everyone out there can find a level to suit them. When you get better simply go up to the next level, and with eight skill levels to choose from you will definitely find a level to suit you. The bots can be quite tricky, coming at you from all angles, they can really surprise you and they are not that predictable, if you think they will come from one direction they might change their minds and come back at you from where they just came from which can throw you off guard and may get you killed! Also if they are close to death they might choose to run away in the hope that they can get a health pack and carry on with their attack, but most times when they try to do this you just kick their ass and finish them off! Team Deathmatch Like Deathmatch but you can't kill your team mates, you set out to kill the other team where you can go solo and just kill opponents or work with your team to try to take them out faster. Capture The Flag On the map, usually at each end of it, are the team flags, one red and one blue each corres ponding to the team. Each must try to get the opposite team's flag, take it back to their ow n area where their flag is to score a point (but your flag has to be in place for that to happen or you cannot score), in this format you can be offensive or defensive it all depends what you want to do. This game type was my favourite in the old UT, I just loved to get the other team's flag, kill all that got in my way and get that valuable point and make the other team look silly. Double Domination This is a new game for UT2003 like Capture The Flag but at a much faster pace, this is frantic and in this game you will have the longest ten seconds of your life! There are two areas that have a focal point on the map, once you have control of both points your team must hold them for ten seconds in order to score a point. This is great for people who love to hold back the enemy and be a hero! I was playing this game for a long time and it has become a favourite of mine. Bombing Run Another new game added to UT2003, this is a cross between American football and soccer but with a UT twist to it of course, if you want to find out how to run for you life under fire this is the game type for you! This is another team event; the maps have a goal point at each end and a ball spawn point at its centre. The idea is to get the ball in the other team's goal by either throwing it in or jumping through it, this gets you the most points. Simple you might say but when you have the ball you cannot fire your weapon, the only advantage you do have is that when you have the ball your life recharges if you get hit. You will have to drop the ball or pass it to another team member in order to be able to fire and blow their heads off. This adds a new element of game play and tactics depending on the skill of the bots you are playing against and with. Knowing where your team mates are is a must and watching that health bar is one thing you will also be doing a lot of because if you have that ball it can go very fast. I think this might become a good multi-player game over the internet. Characters As I looked through the character selection I was taken back to my childhood when I saw some of the characters. To any of you who know of Games Workshop and know what their space marines look like then you will see a great similarity between them and the gene boosted characters, and I am sure that is what they are based on. There is such a broad range of characters that there will be something for everyone here and I'm sure that when new skins become available everyone can have that personal touch. My favourite character in the game is an artificial life form (robot) called Widow Maker, and that's purely just because he is a robot and I just think he looks cool. The other characters range from Egyptians and freaks to aliens, so till those new skin packs come out there is enough to keep most people happy for now. Weapons The weapons in the game seem to have just had an upgrade but they are classic weapons and to get rid of them, especially when it is set just a few years on from the original UT, would have maybe upset a few people. Of course most of the weapons look the same and also act and sound the same as well, you cannot tell much difference from the old sounds to the new sounds if any difference at all, the biggest weapon change is the Sniper Rifle, it does not use bullets any more and has been renamed to Lightning Gun (that pretty much gives away why it does not use bullets). The zoom on the gun works exactly the same way as in the old game (secondary fire button) but looks very different because you use an electrical scope, the gun has a built in monitor and looks great when you use it to zoom in on your enemy's head (Bah, I never use the zoom, takes up valuable time, far more satisfying and impressive to score a long range head shot, on a moving target while running or jumping yourself, without it - Ed) and is a very nice new touch to the game. The gun takes 2 - 3 seconds to recharge between shots so you have to be very accurate and on-target. At close range you don't have a chance with this gun so be ready to change guns quickly once you have fired and missed unless you know you have the time to finish the job. The new gun on the block is the Ion Painter in hand with the Ion Cannon, it's a very simple weapon to use - when you get the Ion Painter all you have to do is fire it at the area you want to completely wipe out by holding the trigger down for about 3 - 4 seconds, the Ion Cannon in the sky then fires down at that area and will destroy a massive area just like the Redeemer but this is just a much faster way to kill lots of people at once, but make sure you are not in its way when the Ion blast comes down or you end up dead with the people you want to kill! The graphics for the gun fire has been improved - the Link and Shock Gun have nice new touches the Link Gun does not fire a big straight line of plasma any more, it now has some shape and form to it. The Shock Rifle has a laser sight on it but don't get excited as it's just for show and doesn't work, I think that is a shame because that would have been a very cool extra but what do I know? The nice new touch I like on this gun is when after you fire you get nice spiral decay effect when the beam dissipates. The UT2003 team has really tried to make the guns look a lot more real and I think even though when you're playing you don't notice the little extras it makes it much nicer to have that level of detail in a game. Maps UT2003 has kept its nice fast flowing maps, but on one or two maps you can get stuck on one or two things that are in the way, usually a step that is maybe too high and not aligned in the right place with the ground or a hill that might be a bit too steep which freezes you, and you have to jump madly to try to get over it. Apart from that and once you know where they are you soon learn to get around them and they are not much of a problem. The maps are gorgeous and have lots of variety to them, from the futuristic industrial looking ones to a forest wonderland that looks like something out of Lord of the Rings, the textures involved are on a massive scale and you can see why the game is 3 GB because half of that is textures. The detail from a blade of grass to a burn mark on the wall is fantastic, and all this graphic wizardry that has gone into the game helps you to get involved and lost in the game, and the lighting that the game has like the rays of light on the ground through a forest canopy just make this game special. Around the maps you find various power-ups, these too have not changed much from the first UT, the only new one is adrenaline, if you get full adrenaline you can use it to make you run fast and kill harder! It's very useful for ambush attacks or even running away (did I just say that?). LAN/internet play To play on the internet you don't need a third party program to play on-line such as Gamespy, now it is all integrated into the game itself which a lot of games are now starting to do and man isn't that great? I have 1 Mb internet connection at home and also my home LAN with my other computer, now when I was playing on-line I could not tell the difference between the internet and my LAN, I could not believe how fast it was, there was no lag and no jumpiness, the game just flowed, it was amazing because I play other games on-line and I still get that jumpiness so I was very impressed. Playing on-line is a joy and very addictive and playing against real people is always so much more fun because you get the added extra of human intelligence and that combined with the game itself you've got a winner! PC test round-up I tested the game on an AMD Athlon XP 2000 with 1.5 GB of RAM with a GeForce 4 Ti4200 128 MB DDR RAM graphics card and an AMD Athlon XP 1800 with 512 MB of RAM with a Radeon 8500 64 MB DDR RAM graphics card. First let's look at the Athlon XP 1800: with this PC the graphic detail options cannot all be turned up, you have to have a reasonable set-up to make sure it runs smooth. Now with the Radeon graphics cards I had a few problems, the graphics went mad as you can see. I do not have any problem with the GeForce 4 whatsoever, I think this fault could be due to ATI's drivers, it is not famous for producing the best drivers in the world and the settings I had it on should not have caused any problems, but maybe in a UT2003 patch they might have a solution for all of us who have this card. Unfortunately this fault happened a few times but when it was running normal it ran great. On the Athlon XP 2000 I turned up all the graphic and sound options to the maximum settings on a resolution of 1,024x768 in 32-bit colour, and had no trouble whatsoever, the game ran smooth all the time but unfortunately what the game has is bugs, and lots of them, I think I have sent about five to six bug reports off to those nice UT2003 design people (nice of me don't you think?) so let's hope that some of these problems will be fixed fast, but expect a meaty patch to come out to cure all those ills because I think there is going to be a lot of them. Although the game does have these bugs they seem to get better each time you run the game, I still have the odd one or two crashes but not very often, when they do happen your PC will more than likely crash. There does not seem to be any bug that affects game play at this time. The maps have a few small faults and the cheesy announcer's voice sounds like he should be in a supermarket telling you of this week's special offers, I mean he just doesn't sound right, he sounds like he is trying too hard to sound mean bless him. The game is just fantastic and all the cons the game has which are minor can't stop the overwhelming pros that make this another classic and it gets a big 5 out of 5.
Verdict
Name: | Unreal Tournament 2003
Publisher: | Atari
Price: | £30
Requires: | OS: Windows 98/ME/2000 SP2/XP Pentium III or Athlon processor, 733 MHz or better 128 MB RAM or better 3 GB hard drive space CD/DVD-ROM 8x speed DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card 3D accelerator card with 16 MB VRAM For mulitiplayer: internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP and IPX) play supported, internet play requires 56 kbps or faster modem
Pros: | Excellent graphics Action-packed game play Good AI Quality maps Built-in connection to play on-line Original new game modes Lots of characters to choose from Map editor/constructor
Cons: | Some layout faults on some maps Annoying announcer voice Bugs Some graphics cards might not work correctly
Rating: |
Useful links
Atari http://www.atari.com Unreal Tournament 2003 web site http://www.unrealtournament2003.com
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